Modern consumer and industrial electronics, especially devices such as global positioning systems, smart phones, vehicle electronics, cellular phones, portable digital assistants, computer systems, and combination devices, are providing increasing levels of functionality to support modern life including updates of reference data for maintaining the latest capabilities. Research and development in the existing technologies can take a myriad of different directions.
Today's vehicles can be considered a rolling server farm. There are information and entertainment systems, motor control and operation systems, collision avoidance systems, safety device control systems, and vehicle monitoring systems. These systems do everything from alerting the driver to an open door to parallel parking the vehicle on its own without driver intervention. The operation of these systems can be altered by applying an update to their operating code. The updates can be offered for ease of use, to address security issues, to repair flaws in the operational sequence, or to enable new or extended features of the hardware platform.
When an operational safety flaw is detected in a vehicle, the manufacturer can issue a recall that requires the drivers of the recalled vehicle to bring their vehicle to a service/repair facility for installation and verification of the update. The service/repair facility can download a proprietary code to change the operation of the system in question and apply the update to the electronic device that supports the system within the vehicle. In most cases, that would mean connecting the device to a central server in order to access the update for download and installation. The coupling of the central server can be performed through a proprietary network, most commonly at service/repair facility. This is not a convenient option for the owner of the vehicle.
The newest models of automobiles have entered the world of updates to intelligence functions of the vehicle. These updates can be costly and time consuming because they require the vehicle to be in the possession of the manufacturer service/repair facility for an extended period of time, on the order of a full day. As computer users can verify, one update can often lead to another to resolve some unforeseen issue.
Thus, a need still remains for a wireless system with database transfer mechanism to maintain vehicle capabilities in a changing environment. In view of the ever-increasing commercial competitive pressures, along with growing consumer expectations and the diminishing opportunities for meaningful product differentiation in the marketplace, it is increasingly critical that answers be found to these problems. Additionally, the need to reduce costs, improve efficiencies and performance, and meet competitive pressures adds an even greater urgency to the critical necessity for finding answers to these problems.
Solutions to these problems have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.